My dissertation establishes the basis for a systematic outlook on the role language plays in human cognition. It is an investigation based on a cognitive conception of language, as opposed to communicative conceptions, viz. those that suppose that language plays no role in cognition. I focus, in Chapter 2, on three paradigmatic theories adopting this perspective, each offering different views on how language contributes to or changes cognition. -/- In Chapter 3, I criticize current views held by dual-process theorists, and (...) I develop a picture of the complex interaction between language and cognition that I deem more plausible by using resources from the literature on the evolution of the faculty of language. Rather than trying to find one general explanation for all cognitive processes, I take seriously the idea that our mind is composed of many subsystems, and that language can interact and modify each in different ways. There is no reason offered in the empirical literature—besides maybe parsimony—that suggest that language has to interact in the same ways with all cognitive processes. Yet, this is seemingly taken for granted, especially within dual-process approaches. -/- On my view, it is a central requirement for a theory of the role of language in cognition to explain how language might have effects, at once, on and within various parts of cognition. In Chapter 4, I explore how this framework can modify how we think about some experiments in psychology, specifically in research on categorization. My idea is that language, once it evolved, changed how some cognitive capacities worked and interacted with each other, but did so in more than one or two ways. Cognitive systems are changed in very different ways—sometimes the transformation is very subtle, such as our way of forming categories by using how similar objects are, while other times it is deep and changes the very way the system works. (shrink)

In demonstration, speakers use real-world activity both for its practical effects and to help make their points. The demonstrations of origami mathematics, for example, reconfigure pieces of paper by folding, while simultaneously allowing their author to signal geometric inferences. Demonstration challenges us to explain how practical actions can get such precise significance and how this meaning compares with that of other representations. In this paper, we propose an explanation inspired by David Lewis’s characterizations of coordination and scorekeeping in conversation. In (...) particular, we argue that words, gestures, diagrams and demonstrations can function together as integrated ensembles that contribute to conversation, because interlocutors use them in parallel ways to coordinate updates to the conversational record. (shrink)

From the premise that our biology imposes cognitive constraints on our epistemic activities, a series of prominent authors – most notably Fodor, Chomsky and McGinn – have argued that we are cognitively closed to certain aspects and properties of the world. Cognitive constraints, they argue, entail cognitive closure. I argue that this is not the case. More precisely, I detect two unwarranted conflations at the core of arguments deriving closure from constraints. The first is a conflation of what I will (...) refer to as ‘representation’ and ‘object of representation’. The second confuses the cognitive scope of the assisted mind for that of the unassisted mind. Cognitive closure, I conclude, cannot be established from pointing out the (uncontroversial) existence of cognitive constraints. (shrink)

Human beings seem to capture time and the temporal properties of events and things in thought by having beliefs usually expressed with statements using tense, or notions such as ‘now’, ‘past’ or ‘future’. Tensed beliefs like these seem indispensable for correct reasoning and timely action. For instance, my belief that my root canal is over seems inexpressible with a statement that does not use tense or a temporal indexical. However, the dominant view on the nature of time is that it (...) forms, with space, a four-dimensional continuum where time does not encompass private perspectives or an absolute, fixed present. This ‘tenseless’ theory of time encounters a challenge in integrating tensed belief, because it cannot easily explain what constitutes a tensed belief in a tenseless world and how such a belief works inside our cognitive network to bring about the actions it does. Providing such an account is the main goal of this dissertation. -/- I argue here that the correct way to proceed would be to utilize philosophical theories dealing with indexicality, as the puzzling features of tensed belief are shared with beliefs expressed by first-person or spatial indexicals. In chapters II and III I expand the dominant theories about indexicality (Lewis, Perry, Kaplan) and apply them to tensed belief. I show that each is in certain respects incomplete or inadequate. -/- My preferred account critiques the preceding theories as mis-attributing the indexicality involved to a fully conceptual element in the way people think about time. I argue that we should instead connect tensed belief to not fully conceptual elements thought. For support I turn to work in perceptual psychology that connects beliefs about space to perceptions of spatial features. In chapter IV I develop an analogous argument about temporal thought and discuss how mental representations involved in perceptions are constitutively related to the formation and preservation of tensed beliefs. Combining this story with a tenseless theory of time should give us a complete, metaphysically uncontroversial, account of the way a tensed belief functions in reasoning and produces timely action. (shrink)

Cognitive sciences as an interdisciplinary field, involving scientific disciplines (such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, economics, etc.), philosophical disciplines (philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, analytic philosophy, etc.) and engineering (notably knowledge engineering), have a vast theoretical and practical content, some even conflicting. In this interdisciplinary context and on computational modeling, ontologies play a crucial role in communication between disciplines and also in a process of innovation of theories, models and experiments in cognitive sciences. We propose a model for (...) this process here. An ontological commitment is advocated as the framework of a scientific realism, which leads computational modeling to search for more realistic models, for a complex systems perspective of nature and cognition. In that way multiagent modeling of complex systems has been fulfilling an important role. (shrink)

Relationship between default semantics and modularity of mind (in particular mind reading through the principle of Relevance).

Evolutionary psychologists often try to “bring together” biology and psychology by making predictions about what specific psychological mechanisms exist from theories about what patterns of behaviour would have been adaptive in the EEA for humans. This paper shows that one of the deepest methodological generalities in evolutionary biology—that proximate explanations and ultimate explanations stand in a many-to-many relation—entails that this inferential strategy is unsound. Ultimate explanations almost never entail the truth of any particular proximate hypothesis. But of course it does (...) not follow that there are no other ways of “bringing together” biology and psychology. Accordingly, this paper explores one other strategy for doing just that, the pursuit of a very specific kind of consilience. However, I argue that inferences reflecting the pursuit of this kind of consilience with the best available theories in contemporary evolutionary biology indicate that psychologists should have a preference for explanations of adaptive behavior in humans that refer to learning and other similarly malleable psychological mechanisms—and not modules or instincts or any other kind of relatively innate and relatively non-malleable psychological mechanism. (shrink)

Cognitive penetration of perception, broadly understood, is the influence that the cognitive system has on a perceptual system. The paper shows a form of cognitive penetration in the visual system which I call ‘architectural’. Architectural cognitive penetration is the process whereby the behaviour or the structure of the perceptual system is influenced by the cognitive system, which consequently may have an impact on the content of the perceptual experience. I scrutinize a study in perceptual learning that provides empirical evidence that (...) cognitive influences in the visual system produce neural reorganization in the primary visual cortex. The type of cognitive penetration can be synchronic and diachronic. (shrink)

Science depends on judgments of the bearing of evidence on theory. Scientists must judge whether an observation or the result of an experiment supports, disconfirms, or is simply irrelevant to a given hypothesis. Similarly, scientists may judge that, given all the available evidence, a hypothesis ought to be accepted as correct or nearly so, rejected as false, or neither. Occasionally, these evidential judgments can be made on deductive grounds. If an experimental result strictly contradicts a hypothesis, then the truth of (...) the data deductively entails the falsity of the hypothesis. In the great majority of cases, however, the connection between evidence and hypothesis is non-demonstrative, or inductive. In particular, this is so whenever a general hypothesis is inferred to be correct on the basis of the available data, since the truth of the data will not deductively entail the truth of the hypothesis. It always remains possible that the hypothesis is false even though the data are correct. (shrink)

This chapter explores a way in which visual processing may involve innate constraints and attempts to show how such processing overcomes one enduring challenge to nativism. In particular, many challenges to nativist theories in other areas of cognitive psychology have focused on the later development of such abilities, and have argued that such development is in conflict with innate origins. Innateness, in these contexts, is seen as antidevelopmental, associated instead with static processes and principles. In contrast, certain perceptual models demonstrate (...) how the very same mental processes can both be innately specified and yet develop richly in response to experience with the environment. This process is entirely unmysterious, as shown in certain formal theories of visual perception, including those that appeal to spontaneous endogenous stimulation and those based on Bayesian inference. (shrink)

How can we explain the intentional nature of an expert’s actions, performed without immediate and conscious control, relying instead on automatic cognitive processes? How can we account for the differences and similarities with a novice’s performance of the same actions? Can a naturalist explanation of intentional expert action be in line with a philosophical concept of intentional action? Answering these and related questions in a positive sense, this dissertation develops a three-step argument. Part I considers different methods of explanations in (...) cognitive neuroscience (Bennett & Hacker’s philosophical, conceptual analysis; Marr’s three levels of explanation; Neural Correlates of Consciousness research; mechanistic explanation), defending ‘mechanistic explanation’ as a method that provides the necessary tools for integrating interdisciplinary insights into human action. Furthermore, a dynamic, explanatory mechanism allows the assessment of the impact of learning and development on expert action in a valuable way that other methods don’t. Part II continues by scrutinizing several cognitive neuroscientific theories of learning and development (neuroconstructivism; dual-processing theories; simulation theory; extended mind/cognition hypothesis), arguing for the complex interactions between different types of processing and different action representations involved in expert action performances. Moreover, according to our discussion of a particular ‘simulation theory’ these interactions can be influenced in several ways with the use of language, allowing an agent to configure a specific action representation for performance at a later stage. The results of Parts I and II are then applied in Part III to a parallel discussion of philosophical analyses of intentional action (discussing i.a. Frankfurt, Bratman, Pacherie and Ricoeur) and cognitive neuroscientific insights in it. Both approaches are found to converge in emphasizing the importance for an expert to develop stable patterns of actions that comply maximally not only with his intentions, but also with his motor expertise and with situational conditions. Consequently, his actions – automatic, or not – rely on this ‘sculpted space of actions’. (shrink)

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...) Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research. (shrink)

Classical (Bayesian) probability (CP) theory has led to an influential research tradition for modeling cognitive processes. Cognitive scientists have been trained to work with CP principles for so long that it is hard even to imagine alternative ways to formalize probabilities. However, in physics, quantum probability (QP) theory has been the dominant probabilistic approach for nearly 100 years. Could QP theory provide us with any advantages in cognitive modeling as well? Note first that both CP and QP theory share the (...) fundamental assumption that it is possible to model cognition on the basis of formal, probabilistic principles. But why consider a QP approach? The answers are that (1) there are many well-established empirical findings (e.g., from the influential Tversky, Kahneman research tradition) that are hard to reconcile with CP principles; and (2) these same findings have natural and straightforward explanations with quantum principles. In QP theory, probabilistic assessment is often strongly context- and order-dependent, individual states can be superposition states (that are impossible to associate with specific values), and composite systems can be entangled (they cannot be decomposed into their subsystems). All these characteristics appear perplexing from a classical perspective. However, our thesis is that they provide a more accurate and powerful account of certain cognitive processes. We first introduce QP theory and illustrate its application with psychological examples. We then review empirical findings that motivate the use of quantum theory in cognitive theory, but also discuss ways in which QP and CP theories converge. Finally, we consider the implications of a QP theory approach to cognition for human rationality. (shrink)

Empirical evidence from developmental psychology and anthropology points out that the human mind is predisposed to conceptualize the world in particular, species-specific ways. These cognitive predispositions lead to universal human commonsense views, often referred to as folk theories. Nevertheless, humans can transgress these views – i.e. they can contradict them with alternative descriptions, they perceive as more accurate – as exemplified in modern sciences. In this paper, I enquire about the cognitive faculties underlying such transgressions. I claim that there are (...) three faculties enabling us to part with these universal commonsense views of the world imposed by our nature. The first is our ability to represent representations – i.e. to form metarepresentations. The second is our ability to produce alternative representations both by explaining a familiar subject matter in terms of the principles governing different conceptual domains than the one that we are predisposed to apply to the subject matter and by directing our mind to new subject matters (for which we have no predisposed conceptual grasp), understanding them in terms of familiar domains. The third, finally, is our ability to give these representations an epistemic orientation. Key words: Human cognition, Domain-specific knowledge systems, Cognitive predispositions, Folk theories, Cognitive flexibility, Human – nonhuman distinction. (shrink)

Critics of the computational connectionism of the last decade suggest that it shares undesirable features with earlier empiricist or associationist approaches, and with behaviourist theories of learning. To assess the accuracy of this charge the works of earlier writers are examined for the presence of such features, and brief accounts of those found are given for Herbert Spencer, William James and the learning theorists Thorndike, Pavlov and Hull. The idea that cognition depends on associative connections among large networks of neurons (...) is indeed one with precedents, although the implications of this for psychological issues have been interpreted variously — not all versions of connectionism are alike. (shrink)

Referring to the difference between Stakeholder Theory and Shareholder Theory, the ethical direction for companies to take is deeply discussed.

One way to characterize the special relation that one has to one's own body is to say that only one's body appears to one from the inside. Although widely accepted, the nature of this specific experiential mode of presentation of the body is rarely spelled out. Most definitions amount to little more than lists of the various body senses (including senses of posture, movement, heat, pressure, and balance). It is true that body senses provide a kind of informational access to (...) one's own body, which one has to no other bodies, by contrast to external senses like vision, which can take many bodies as their object. But a theory of bodily awareness needs to take into account recent empirical evidence that indicates that bodily awareness is infected by a plague of multisensory effects, regardless of any dichotomy between body senses and external senses. Here I will argue in favour of a multimodal conception of bodily awareness. I will show that the body senses fail to fully account for the content of bodily experiences. I will then propose that vision helps compensate for the insufficiencies of the body senses in people who can see. I will finally argue that the multimodality of bodily experiences does not prevent privileged access to one's body. (shrink)

Modern biology has not yet come to terms with the presence of many organic codes in Nature, despite the fact that we can prove their existence. As a result, it has not yet accepted the idea that the great events of macroevolution were associated with the origin of new organic codes, despite the fact that this is the most parsimonious and logical explanation of those events. This is probably due to the fact that the existence of organic codes in all (...) fundamental processes of life, and in all major transitions in the history of life, has enormous theoretical implications. It requires nothing less than a new theoretical framework, and that kind of change is inevitably slow. There are too many facts to reconsider, too many bits of history to weave together in a new mosaic. But this is what science is about, and the purpose of the present paper is to show that it can be done. More precisely, it is shown that the whole natural history of the brain can be revisited in the light of the organic codes. What is described here is only a bird’s-eye view of brain macroevolution, but it is hoped that the extraordinary potential of the organic codes can nevertheless come through. The paper contains also another message. The organic codes prove that life is based on semiosis, and are in fact the components of organic semiosis, the first and the most diffused form of semiosis on Earth, but not the only one. It will be shown that the evolution of the brain was accompanied by the development of two new types of sign processes. More precisely, it gave origin first to interpretive semiosis, mostly in vertebrates, and then to cultural semiosis, in our species. (shrink)

We propose another positive illusion that fits with McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children's developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual.

The pivotal problem of comorbidity research lies in the psychometric foundation it rests on, that is, latent variable theory, in which a mental disorder is viewed as a latent variable that causes a constellation of symptoms. From this perspective, comorbidity is a (bi)directional relationship between multiple latent variables. We argue that such a latent variable perspective encounters serious problems in the study of comorbidity, and offer a radically different conceptualization in terms of a network approach, where comorbidity is hypothesized to (...) arise from direct relations between symptoms of multiple disorders. We propose a method to visualize comorbidity networks and, based on an empirical network for major depression and generalized anxiety, we argue that this approach generates realistic hypotheses about pathways to comorbidity, overlapping symptoms, and diagnostic boundaries, that are not naturally accommodated by latent variable models: Some pathways to comorbidity through the symptom space are more likely than others; those pathways generally have the same direction (i.e., from symptoms of one disorder to symptoms of the other); overlapping symptoms play an important role in comorbidity; and boundaries between diagnostic categories are necessarily fuzzy. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Normative theories can be useful in developing descriptive theories, as when normative subjective expected utility theory is used to develop descriptive rational choice theory and behavioral game theory. “Ought” questions are also the essence of theories of moral reasoning, a domain of higher mental processing that could not survive without normative considerations.

Everybody knows that humans are cultural animals. Although this fact is universally acknowledged, many opportunities to exploit it are overlooked. In this article, I propose shifting our attention from local examples of extended mind to the cultural-cognitive ecosystems within which human cognition is embedded. I conclude by offering a set of conjectures about the features of cultural-cognitive ecosystems.

The emerging consensus in the philosophy of cognition is that cognition is situated, i.e., dependent upon or co-constituted by the body, the environment, and/or the embodied interaction with it. But what about emotions? If the brain alone cannot do much thinking, can the brain alone do some emoting? If not, what else is needed? Do (some) emotions (sometimes) cross an individual's boundary? If so, what kinds of supra-individual systems can be bearers of affective states, and why? And does that make (...) emotions ?embedded? or ?extended? in the sense cognition is said to be embedded and extended? Section 2 shows why it is important to understand in which sense body, environment, and our embodied interaction with the world contribute to our affective life. Section 3 introduces some key concepts of the debate about situated cognition. Section 4 draws attention to an important disanalogy between cognition and emotion with regard to the role of the body. Section 5 shows under which conditions a contribution by the environment results in non-trivial cases of ?embedded? emotions. Section 6 is concerned with affective phenomena that seem to cross the organismic boundaries of an individual, in particular with the idea that emotions are ?extended? or ?distributed.? (shrink)

In this paper, we first review recent arguments about the direct perception of the intentions and emotions of others, emphasizing the role of embodied interaction. We then consider a possible objection to the direct perception hypothesis from social psychology, related to phenomena like ‘dehumanization’ and ‘implicit racial bias’, which manifest themselves on a basic bodily level. On the background of such data, one might object that social perception cannot be direct since it depends on and can in fact be interrupted (...) by a set of cultural beliefs. We argue, however, that far from threatening the idea of direct perception, these findings clearly contradict the idea of hardwired theory of mind modules. More generally, we suggest that in order to further the understanding of social cognition we must take seriously insights about in-group and out-group distinctions and related phenomena, all of which are currently neglected in the mainstream social cognition literature. (shrink)

How do agents with limited cognitive capacities flourish in informationally impoverished or unexpected circumstances? Aristotle argued that human flourishing emerged from knowing about the world and our place within it. If he is right, then the virtuous processes that produce knowledge, best explain flourishing. Influenced by Aristotle, virtue epistemology defends an analysis of knowledge where beliefs are evaluated for their truth and the intellectual virtue or competences relied on in their creation. However, human flourishing may emerge from how degrees of (...) ignorance are managed in an uncertain world. Perhaps decision-making in the shadow of knowledge best explains human wellbeing—a Bayesian approach? In this dissertation I argue that a hybrid of virtue and Bayesian epistemologies explains human flourishing—what I term homeostatic epistemology. Homeostatic epistemology supposes that an agent has a rational credence p when p is the product of reliable processes aligned with the norms of probability theory; whereas an agent knows that p when a rational credence p is the product of reliable processes such that: 1) p meets some relevant threshold for belief, 2) p coheres with a satisficing set of relevant beliefs and, 3) the relevant set of beliefs is coordinated appropriately to meet the integrated aims of the agent. Homeostatic epistemology recognizes that justificatory relationships between beliefs are constantly changing to combat uncertainties and to take advantage of predictable circumstances. Contrary to holism, justification is built up and broken down across limited sets like the anabolic and catabolic processes that maintain homeostasis in the cells, organs and systems of the body. It is the coordination of choristic sets of reliably produced beliefs that create the greatest flourishing given the limitations inherent in the situated agent. (shrink)

Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitions – for example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecture – for example, as a case study (...) of how consciously inaccessible subpersonal processes give rise to conscious states, or as a candidate example of cognitive penetrability? What methodological issues arise concerning how linguistic intuitions are gathered and interpreted – for example, might some subjects' intuitions be more reliable than others? And what bearing might all this have on philosophers' own appeals to intuitions? This paper surveys and critically discusses leading answers to these questions. In particular, we defend a ‘mentalist’ conception of linguistics and the role of linguistic intuitions therein. (shrink)

In this article I raise empirical challenges for the claim tha area MT/V5 is the neural correlate for visual experience as of motion (Block 2005). In particular, I focus on the claim that there is matching content between area MT, on one hand, and visual experience as of motion, on the other hand (Chalmers 2000, Block 2007). I survey two lines of empirical evidence which challenge the claim of matching content in area MT. The first line of evidence covers new (...) results in neuroscience which emphasize the ongoing dynamics in cortical activity. The second line of evidence focuses on results regarding area MT in particular (Maier et al. 2007 and Cohen and Newsome 2008). Together, the empirical results indicate that neural processing is context sensitive in a way that challenges the attribution of content to local areas of cortex, to area MT in particular. In the final part of the article I explore alternative approaches and discuss remaining issues. (shrink)

This is the first in a series of two articles that serve as an introduction to recent debates about cognitive phenomenology. Cognitive phenomenology can be defined as the experience that is associated with cognitive activities, such as thinking, reasoning, and understanding. What is at issue in contemporary debates is not the existence of cognitive phenomenology, so defined, but rather its nature and theoretical role. The first article examines questions about the nature of cognitive phenomenology, while the second article explores the (...) philosophical implications of these questions for the role of consciousness in theories of intentionality, introspective self-knowledge, and knowledge of the external world. (shrink)

In this paper, I claim that extant empirical data do not support a radically embodied understanding of the mind but, instead, suggest (along with a variety of other results) a massively representational view. According to this massively representational view, the brain is rife with representations that possess overlapping and redundant content, and many of these represent other mental representations or derive their content from them. Moreover, many behavioral phenomena associated with attention and consciousness are best explained by the coordinated activity (...) of units with redundant content. I finish by arguing that this massively representational picture challenges the reliability of a priori theorizing about consciousness. (shrink)

Could there be a cognitive zombie – that is, a creature with the capacity for cognition, but no capacity for consciousness? Searle argues that there cannot be a cognitive zombie because there cannot be an intentional zombie: on this view, there is a connection between consciousness and cognition that is derived from a more fundamental connection between consciousness and intentionality. However, I argue that there are good empirical reasons for rejecting the proposed connection between consciousness and intentionality. Instead, I argue (...) that there is a connection between consciousness and cognition that is derived from a more fundamental connection between consciousness and rationality. On this view, there cannot be a cognitive zombie because there cannot be a rational zombie. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

Bayesian Epistemology is a general framework for thinking about agents who have beliefs that come in degrees. Theories in this framework give accounts of rational belief and rational belief change, which share two key features: (i) rational belief states are represented with probability functions, and (ii) rational belief change results from the acquisition of evidence. This dissertation focuses specifically on the second feature. I pose the Evidence Question: What is it to have evidence? Before addressing this question we must have (...) an understanding of Bayesian Epistemology. The first chapter argues that we should understand Bayesian Epistemology as giving us theories that are evaluative and not action-guiding. I reach this verdict after considering the popular ‘ought’-implies-‘can’ objection to Bayesian Epistemology. The second chapter argues that it is important for theories in Bayesian Epistemology to answer the Evidence Question, and distinguishes between internalist and externalist answers. The third and fourth chapters present and defend a specific answer to the Evidence Question. The account is inspired by reliabilist accounts of justification, and attempts to understand what it is to have evidence by appealing solely to considerations of reliability. Chapter 3 explains how to understand reliability, and how the account fits with Bayesian Epistemology, in particular, the requirement that an agent’s evidence receive probability 1. Chapter 4 responds to objections, which maintain that the account gives the wrong verdict in a variety of situations including skeptical scenarios, lottery cases, scientific cases, and cases involving inference. After slight modifications, I argue that my account has the resources to answer the objections. The fifth chapter considers the possibility of losing evidence. I show how my account can model these cases. To do so, however, we require a modification to Conditionalization, the orthodox principle governing belief change. I present such a modification. The sixth and seventh chapters propose a new understanding of Dutch Book Arguments, historically important arguments for Bayesian principles. The proposal shows that the Dutch Book Arguments for implausible principles are defective, while the ones for plausible principles are not. The final chapter is a conclusion. (shrink)

Theories of collective intentions must distinguish genuinely collective intentions from coincidentally harmonized ones. Two apparently equally apt ways of doing so are the ‘neo-reductionism’ of Bacharach (2006) and Gold and Sugden (2007a) and the ‘non-reductionism’ of Searle (1990, 1995). Here, we present findings from theoretical linguistics that show that we is not a cognitive primitive, but is composed of notions of I and grouphood. The ramifications of this finding on the structure both of grammatical and lexical systems suggests that an (...) understanding of collective intentionality does not require a primitive we-intention, but the notion of grouphood implicit in team reasoning, coupled with the individual concept I. This, we argue, supports neo-reductionism but poses difficulties for non-reductionism. (shrink)

In the last few decades, there has been a genuine ‘adaptive turn’ in psychiatry, resulting in evolutionary accounts for an increasing number of psychopathologies. In this paper, I explore the advantages and problems with the two main evolutionary approaches to depression, namely the mismatch and persistence accounts . I will argue that while both evolutionary theories of depression might provide some helpful perspectives, the accounts also harbor significant flaws that might question their authority and usefulness as explanations.

This paper provides a categorization of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena.

This paper is an attempt at exploring the possibility of reconciling the two interpretations of biolinguistics which have been recently projected by Koster(Biolinguistics 3(1):61–92, 2009). The two interpretations—trivial and nontrivial—can be roughly construed as non-internalist and internalist conceptions of biolinguistics respectively. The internalist approach boils down to a conception of language where language as a mental grammar in the form of I-language grows and functions like a biological organ. On the other hand, under such a construal consistent with Koster’s (Biolinguistics (...) 3(1):61-92, 2009), the non-internalist version does not necessarily have to be externalist in nature; rather it is a matter of mutual reinforcement of biology and culture under the rubric of a co-evolutionary dynamics. Here it will be argued that the apparent dichotomy between these two conceptions of biolinguistics can perhaps be resolved if we have a richer synthesis that accounts for both internalism and non-internalism. (shrink)

Experimental research with human infants has demonstrated a level of sensitivity to music comparable to that of musically unsophisticated adults. This evidence points to the biologically hard‐wired nature of musical responsivity, and further raises the question of the evolutionary roots of the phenomenon. The question is addressed by examining (1) the ontogenetic and phylogenetic order in which speech and music are acquired, (2) the possible adaptive properties of music and dance, and (3) cognitive evolutionary retrodictions about the period in prehistory (...) when art began. Much uncertainty continues to surround these issues, but there is a strong indication that the performing and visual arts are natural phenomena with distinctively different evolutionary roots. (shrink)

Cohen Kadosh & Walsh (CK&W) present convincing evidence indicating the existence of notation-specific numerical representations in parietal cortex. We suggest that the same conclusions can be drawn for a particular type of numerical representation: the representation of time. Notation-dependent representations need not be limited to number but may also be extended to other magnitude-related contents processed in parietal cortex (Walsh 2003).

False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

Standard models of visual perception hold that vision is an inferential or interpretative process. Such models are said to be superior to competing, non-inferential views in explanatory power. In particular, they are said to be capable of explaining a number of otherwise mysterious, visual phenomena such as multi-stable perception. Multi-stable perception paradigmatically occurs in the presence of ambiguous figures, single images that can give rise to two or more distinct percepts. Different interpretations are said to produce the different percepts. In (...) this paper, I argue that a non-inferential account of visual perception is just as capable of explaining multi-stable perception. I propose an embedded understanding of vision, and show how the embedded account can, after properly qualifying them, use the explanatory resources of the inferential view to explain just what such a view explains. (shrink)

This essay presents an analysis in the area of the theory of human action. Philosophers and pschologists are interested in theories of action because action defines those behaviors that are under our control as opposed to behaviors that in some sense just happen. In its wider context, a theory of action has implications for legal reasoning or moral reasoning. Throughout the history of this topic, one of the leading theories of action has been the volitional theory. Volition, in its simplest (...) sense, refers to an act of will. In this essay, I evaluate the work of Carl Ginet, who is one of the leading modern advocates of the Volitional theory of action. I argue below that Ginet's sophisticated volitional theory of action suffers from certain internal problems that result from Ginet's project of removing causal relations from his account of action. Ultimately, I argue that when he does this, Ginet reduces the theoretical resources for explaning how volition is connected to both overt behavior and to the agent. Furthermore, I belive that elucidating such problems is valuable just because this process reveals why we should focus our efforts upon a leading alternative to the volitional theory, namely the belief/desire theory of action. In the way, my analysis of Ginet reveals the strengths of an externalist rather than an internalist approach to the problem of action. (shrink)